Monday, July 23, 2012

The Atlanta Child Murders

Setting the Stage

Georgia map, with Atlanta locator

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the city of Atlanta, Georgia, had
grown into an economic powerhouse in the South. Long developing as a
major regional transportation center, the city had also boasted a number
of major corporations, such as Coca Cola, Delta Airlines, and Cox
Communications.The increasingly black population in the city
voted into the mayor's office one of their own race, a young lawyer
named Maynard Jackson.� For Jackson, keeping a power-balancing act
between his black constituency and the existing white power structure
was critical.� Otherwise, the white power structure would flee to the
suburbs, leaving the city with a much diminished tax base.�

Bernard Headley

Bernard Headley in his book The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race
says, "Inevitably, many of the balancing acts that Maynard Jackson was
forced to perform with Atlanta's white power structure were seen by
blacks as betrayal....So throughout much of Jackson's second term, a
context of racial strain persisted."

The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race, by Bernard Headley

Despite the strong economic growth, the black population of the city
remained very poor.� Not surprisingly, a serious crime problem developed
that made Atlanta one of the most dangerous cities in the country.�
Atlanta's business community was alarmed at the spiraling crime rate,
fearful that businesses would flee the city and conventions would find
safer cities for their meetings.This situation reached a
crisis�level as a series of murders of black children and teenagers
began to emerge, throwing an unwelcome spotlight on the entire city. The
murders, believed at that time, to be the work of a racist white group
did nothing to recommend the city to tourists and�new business
opportunities.

The Looming Crisis

In a four-month period, two very high profile street murders of
whites by blacks would crystallize their fears:� On June 28, 1979, a
young white doctor attending one of the city's conventions was murdered
by two black robbers.� Then on October 17, 1979, a mentally unstable
black man gunned down a white legal secretary on her birthday.� Everyone
was outraged and the media demanded a crackdown on crime.

Mayor Maynard Jackson

In 1978, Mayor Jackson had replaced his controversial black public
safety commissioner Reginald Eaves with Dr. Lee Brown, who was an
intelligent, capable manager but had very limited street experience and
was perceived as socially distant from the poor black community.Little
did the city understand that these two highly publicized crimes would
be dwarfed by two other crimes which, when they happened, received
almost no publicity at all.� Two black boys were found murdered at the
end of July 1979, officially starting one of the most highly publicized
murder series in history.� A couple of years later, twenty-nine black
youths would be dead and a black man, Wayne Williams,�who many people
believe was railroaded by the government, would be imprisoned for life.

Ominous Beginning

Edward Hope Smith

Fourteen-year-old Edward Hope Smith lived in one of Atlantas lower
income housing projects on Cape Street in southwest Atlanta. It was a
destitute place that many had the misfortune of living and few had the
means to escape, even though Edward had tried. It isnt difficult to
understand why anyone would want to run away from such a disheartening
place where more garbage filled the streets than people. Just after
midnight in the early morning of July 21, 1979, Edward left a skating
rink where he had spent the evening with his girlfriend and began the
long walk home.

Alfred Evans

Several days later, his friend fourteen-year-old Alfred Evans, who lived
on the other side of town off Memorial Drive in the East Lake Meadows
housing projects, left home to see a karate movie in downtown Atlanta.Both
boys were very athletic. Smith was a football fanatic and Evans was
equally exuberant about basketball, professional wrestling, boxing and
karate.� Smith was training to play on the high school football team in
the fall and Evans played basketball and boxed.� These boys had promise,
despite their disadvantaged status.� They had dreams that they were
enthusiastically pursuing.��
Dreams became nightmares when Edward
never got home from the skating rink that morning and Alfred didn't make
it to the karate movie.� Instead, both of them were found July 28 in a
wooded area off Niskey Lake Road in the southwestern part of the city.
Edward had been killed with a .22-caliber gun and Alfred by an
undetermined means -- the medical examiner guessed at asphyxia, possibly
resulting from strangulation.� Both boys were dressed in black, but
Edward's socks and distinctive football shirt were missing; Alfred was
wearing a belt that wasn't his.� Edward was easily identified with
dental records, but Alfred's identification is still debated.
What
happened?� Police determined that both boys had at least some
involvement with drugs and were possibly together at a pot party.� One
caller claimed that Alfred shot Edward and a third boy strangled Alfred
in a fit of rage.� These stories did not work well with the difference
of days between their disappearances, nor did the caller ever show up to
make a formal statement.� Well, that's all the police needed to hear:�
black boys involved with drugs (no matter how tangentially) -- sad, but
it happens all the time. Further investigation was very limited.

Two More Boys

Milton Harvey

While the police may have been able to get away with dismissing the
deaths of Smith and Evans as "drug-related," it was certainly not the
case with fourteen-year-old Milton Harvey. His parents had extricated
Milton from the high-risk projects years ago and moved him to a pleasant
middle-class neighborhood in northwest Atlanta.� He didn't go to school
on the first day of the session because his mother had inadvertently
bought him the "wrong" kind of sneakers and he couldn't face the
embarrassment.� That day, September 4, 1979, Milton borrowed a bike and
took a check to the bank to pay a credit card bill for his mother. He
disappeared along with the bicycle, which was found a week later on a
deserted dirt lane named Sandy Creek Road.Miltons badly
decomposed remains were found in mid-November in a rubbish dump off
Redwine Road in the suburb of East Point, a jurisdiction outside of
Atlantas city limits, and many miles from the bicycle and Milton's home.
His death was not at first considered a homicide since there were no
marks of violence on the skeletal remains.

Yusef Bell

A few weeks before Milton's remains were found, Yusef Bell, an extremely
gifted nine-year-old, disappeared on his way to the store to buy snuff
for a neighbor.� After buying the snuff, a woman thought she saw him get
into a blue car with a man she believed was the former husband of
Yusef's mother Camille.� The police later discounted this sighting.Unlike
the earlier three cases, Yusef's disappearance received some media
attention as Camille begged the abductor to release her well-loved boy.�
Her community was rallying around her for emotional support.
Camille's
hopes vanished when a school custodian in the abandoned E.P. Johnson
Elementary School discovered Yusef on November 8th. His body had been
wedged into a concrete hole in the floor. He had been strangled to
death, either by hand or ligature.�The boy had been barefoot when he
disappeared and was still barefoot when he was found, but the bottoms of
his feet had been washed clean.
This case had finally captured
the attention of the community at large. Yusef's funeral was a major
event. City officials, black leaders and politicians of every color fell
all over themselves to give their condolences to Camille and mourn the
tragic death of this promising young man.� Mayor Jackson promised a full
investigation but none of the four murders were considered connected --
just random acts of violence that "happen" in poor black neighborhoods.
Camille
Bell and her friends didn't buy that story and realized that these
murders were not typical.� They continued to articulate their
displeasure at the efforts of the police and the city administration,
which they considered too distant from its black constituency.� Along
with this vocal displeasure crept in the fear that the murders were
racially motivated and that the Klan was behind it.
The police got
some breathing room between the last half of November and early March.�
In March of 1980, the killing of black children and youths began in
earnest.

End to the Lull

Angel Lenair

The lull came to a nasty end on March 4, 1980 when
twelve-year-old Angel Lenair finished her homework and left her
apartment in southwest Atlanta. When she didn't come home for her
favorite television show, her mother Venus Taylor called the police. As
Angel was approaching puberty, her mother worried more and more. Their
home was near Fort McPherson and men were starting to take an interest
in Angel.Venus Taylor's worst fears were confirmed
on March 10, 1980 when the police found Angel's body tied to a tree with
an electrical cord around her neck and a pair of panties that did not
belong to Angel stuffed into her mouth. Cause of death was asphyxiation
by strangulation with the electrical cord. Although Angel's hymen had
been broken and there were some minor abrasions in the genital area, the
medical examiner did not interpret those facts to mean evidence of
sexual assault. Those findings became controversial and did not mean
that Angel was not the victim of some sexual abuse.This
particular case was quite different than the previous cases, in that
the victim was female and her body was found under different
circumstances than the previous male victims. There were two suspects,
who were eventually cleared of the murder.

Jefferey

Jefferey Mathis

The very next day after Angel's body was found, Jefferey
Mathis, aged ten, had left his home to buy cigarettes for his mother in
the early evening. Like Yusef Bell, Jefferey would never return from
his errand, which was only a few blocks away from his home. His mother
Willie Mae Mathis became worried when he was gone over an hour and sent
her other sons to look for him. Later that night, a patrolman told Mrs.
Mathis to call the missing person's department if he did not come home
by morning.What she did not immediately understand
when she contacted that department the next day is that the missing
person's department at that time in the Atlanta Police Department and
in many major cities did very little to investigate the disappearance
of young people. It was assumed that children and teenagers were
runaways and not the victims of foul play.Jefferey
had last been seen by a friend getting into the backseat of a blue car,
possibly a Buick. Thirteen days after Mathis had gone missing, Willie
Turner, who had recognized Mathis' picture from the newspaper, claimed
that he saw Jefferey in a blue NOVA car, driven by a white adult man.
Willie Turner also told police that the man he had seen with Mathis had
later in the week pulled a gun on him before taking off in his car.
Police did little in response to the information given by Turner. The
report was filed away and forgotten. The blue car that was earlier seen
by Mathis' friend in connection with Jefferey's disappearance was very
similar to the description of a car seen by an eyewitness in a later
disappearance case of a boy named Aaron Wyche. Jefferey Mathis' two
brothers had also reported seeing a blue Buick in the driveway of a
house that Jefferey frequented. Interestingly, shortly after Mathis'
disappearance, boys from his school had complained to their principle
that two black men in a blue car had attempted to lure them away from
the schoolyard. The youngsters had memorized the license plate and
reported it to police. Once again, police did little to investigate the
matter.

A Murderous Rampage

Eric Middlebrooks

Eric Middlebrooks, 14, got a phone call around 10:30 P.M
Sunday night, May 18, 1980. He immediately grabbed his tools and told
his foster mother he was going out to repair his bike. Early the next
morning, his body was found a few blocks away. His bicycle was nearby.
Eric had been bludgeoned to death.As police looked
into this murder, it was suspected that Eric had been eyewitness to a
robbery and that the robbery suspects were also the murder suspects.
However, there was insufficient proof.

Christopher Richardson

Just outside the city limits of Atlanta in the Decatur,
twelve-year-old Christopher Richardson lived in a nice middle class
neighborhood with his grandparents and mother. In the early afternoon of
June 9, 1980, Christopher went to a local recreation center to swim. He
never got there.

LaTonya Wilson

A few weeks later in the early morning of June 22, 1980,
an amazing crime occurred. Seven-year-old LaTonya Wilson was abducted
from her home. A neighbor claimed that she saw a black man remove the
windowpane in the Wilson apartment, climb into the apartment and leave
with the little girl in his arms. Chet Dettlinger in his book The List describes how difficult it would have been to do what the neighbor claimed she saw:"If,
as the neighbor said, the kidnapper climbed through that window, he
stepped squarely onto a bed where two other Wilson children were asleep.
Neither woke up. Once inside, he stole LaTonya from her bed, carrying
her past the door of her parents' room. He walked out the back door,
leaving it ajar. Outside, he is said to have paused in the parking lot
to speak to another black male, all the while holding the limp figure of
LaTonya Wilson under his right arm."Whoever was
responsible for these murders and disappearances was approaching a
record in the history of crime. What the citizens of Atlanta, the city
government and eventually the FBI didn't realize was that it was just
the beginning. What Bernard Headley aptly named "A Summer of Death" was
just beginning.

STOP

The cumulative ineffectiveness of the Atlanta police to
solve the growing number of missing and murdered children galvanized
three of the victims' mothers Camille Bell, Willie Mae Mathis and Venus
Taylor to join with Reverend Earl Carroll to form the Committee to
Stop Children's Murders (STOP). The group pressured both the Atlanta
city government and sought support from the white corporate power
structure.

Aaron Wyche

The group was formed none too soon because the day after
La Tonya Wilson's shocking abduction, ten-year-old Aaron Wyche
disappeared. The next day his body was found beneath a six-lane highway
bridge that passed over railroad tracks in DeKalb County. His death was
caused by asphyxia, said the medical examiner, because he landed in a
way that prevented him from breathing. This death was not initially
considered a homicide even though Aaron was deathly afraid of heights
and would not have voluntarily climbed that trestle unless he was
running away from someone. The assumption was that Aaron fell off the
bridge, despite the fact that the guardrails on the bridge were almost
as high as Aaron was. Dettlinger says, "There is no way Aaron Wyche
could have fallen off that bridge. Jumped or been thrown, maybe; but
fall off, no way."

Anthony Carter

July 6, 1980, nine-year-old Anthony Carter was out
playing hide and seek with his cousin after 1 A.M. in the morning when
he vanished. He was found stabbed to death the next day behind a
warehouse less than a mile from his home.Throughout
this epidemic of murder and missing children, the Atlanta police
maintained that the cases were separate and not connected. The general
attitude was that Atlanta in recent history had a high rate of murdered
children. However, after the publicity that the mothers' group STOP was
getting, the city government bowed to the political pressure and
announced the formation of a task force in mid-July to focus their
investigative efforts.

Ransom

Earl Terrell

Two weeks later on July 30, 1980, eleven-year-old Earl
Terrell went with some friends to the South Bend Park swimming pool.
Earl began to misbehave and the lifeguard threw him out of the pool.
After that, Earl disappeared.Earl's aunt, who lived
next door, got a phone call. "I've got Earl. Don't' call the police," he
told her. Shortly afterwards, the man who sounded like a white
southerner called back, saying, "I've got Earl. He's in Alabama. It
will cost you $200 to get him back. I will call back on Friday."
(Detlinger and Prugh).According to Detlinger, police
learned of a child pornography ring that was operating right across the
street from the South Bend Park pool. John David Wilcoxen was convicted
when police found thousands of photos of children pornographically
displayed. Police dismissed the connection between Wilcoxen and Terrell
because the photos were of white boys, but a witness claimed that Earl
Terrell had been to Wilcoxen's house several times. Also, there was some
disagreement as to whether the photos were actually all white boys or
not.

Witnesses to Murder

At this point, LaTonya Wilson had been abducted and Earl
Terrell potentially abducted and transported across state lines.
Kidnapping and transporting a person across state lines was the
jurisdiction of the FBI. Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson had been trying
to get the FBI into this case and now he had the proper rationale.

Clifford Jones

The summer ended up with the death of one more child.
Thirteen-year-old Clifford Jones had come to visit his grandmother in
Atlanta and was found strangled by some unknown ligature on August 20.
His body had been put in a dumpster wearing shorts and underwear that
were not his.Police were presented with a strong
suspect in a manager of a laundromat that, according to Chet Detlinger,
"was widely known for homosexual gatherings." Bernard Headley sums up
the case against this suspect: "Three youthful witnesses saw the manager
go into the rear room with a black boy. One of them said he saw the
manager 'strangle and beat' the boy, then carry his body out to the
trash container. Two polygraph tests were administered to the Laundromat
manager. He 'failed' both, according to FBI records even though he
admitted that he knew Clifford and that Clifford was in his Laundromat
on the evening of August 20, 1980. Medical experts had determined that
the time of Clifford's death was between four and six hours before the
discovery of his body, which would have placed the Laundromat manager
with the boy around the time he was killed. The authorities had not
charged the man with anything, however, because they determined that the
youth who said he actually saw Clifford Jones being murdered was
'retarded.'"Another witness said he had seen the
man, whom he knew, carry a large object wrapped in plastic and place it
by the dumpsters the night before Jones' body was discovered. The large
object wrapped in plastic turned out to be the body of Clifford Jones.
Two other witnesses claimed to see the same man, who they had also
known, carrying an object wrapped in plastic to the dumpsters.

The List

Once the official task force was formed, the police had to
decide which cases to include in their investigation. Those specially
assigned cases, which represented murders that fit particular
parameters, were compiled into a list. The "List" took on a life of its
own during the media hype and investigation into the murders and is
still the source of controversy. Unfortunately, The List led to more
people misunderstanding the facts about the cases than to their
understanding of them. This was largely due to the inaccurate and
incomplete information gathered about each of the victims, which were
often times caused by negligence, ignorance and mismanagement by
authorities. In many instances reports conflicted with one another;
bodies were misidentified; reports were sometimes changed or lost; and
crime scenes destroyed. Moreover, according to author and investigator
Chet Dettlinger, many that should have made the List never did. Of the
many hundreds of murders that occurred during the late 1970's and early
1980's, at least ninety of those shared a similar geographic and/or
social connection with one another. Connections that would later be
ignored by officials in more than sixty of the ninety cases, during the
course of the investigation into the murders. The Task Force Unit
ignored the more than sixty cases mostly because they failed to meet the
parameters that police were continuously changing and because they
failed to notice the geographic and social connection between the
victims, both on and off The List.More than sixty
names never made the List, which could have been because they fit
similar social and geographical patterns of those cases that had
qualified for the List. Unfortunately, the Task Force disregarded many
as "special cases" because they failed to meet their parameters, which
were continually modified. Some, who had failed to make the List at one
point, could have qualified for it at another, after the List was
changed. This allowed many victims cases to slip through the cracks that
should have received the attention they deserved. After Wayne Williams
arrest, more than twenty people were murdered, some of which could have
also made The List. They never did because police had stopped adding
names to the List after they had Williams in custody. Some of those who
had fit the social and geographic parameters recognized by Dettlinger
were Cynthia Montgomery, Angela Bacon, Joseph Lee, Faye Yearby and
Stanley Murray. They are just a few of the many who had not made the
List.For example, Faye Yearby, twenty-two years old,
was considered too old to have made the List at the time of her death
in January of 1981. She was found almost nine months after Angel Lenair
's body had been found, stabbed to death and tied to a tree. Yearby had
also been found bound to a tree in almost the exact same position Angel
had been found. Even though her death, in many ways, resembled that of
Angel Lenair, Task Force Agents refused to acknowledge any link between
the cases. Furthermore, she was never added to the List because of her
age and her sex.

Making Sense of the Crisis

Darron Glass

On September 14, 1980, ten-year-old Darron Glass
vanished. Shortly afterwards, his foster mother received an emergency
phone call from someone claiming to be Darron, but when she answered the
phone, the line was dead. The police ignored the case however, because
Darron had run away several times before.The black
leadership, churches and community at large were mobilizing along a
number of fronts to deal with this crisis. Activities ranged from prayer
vigils, safety education programs, and even regular searches for the
missing children. The Atlanta government had even gone so far as to
bring in psychic Dorothy Allison, who had assisted in some high-profile
cases.Chet Dettlinger was the first to understand
that there was a geographic connection to the victims. A number of the
victims knew each other and either lived, were last seen or their bodies
were found in several key areas of the city. Detlinger tried valiantly
to explain the unfolding pattern that he saw emerging, so that police
could concentrate their efforts in these critical areas, but police did
not warm to his theories.What the police were still
wrestling with was a case in which there were many different causes of
deaths, modus operandi, and signatures, only a few of which seemed to
fit a pattern. Usually a serial killer selects a particular type of
target that is either male or female, rarely both. While the MO can
change based upon the killer's experience or opportunity, the signature,
according to Robert D. Keppel (Signature Killers), is the
killer's "psychological 'calling card' that he leaves at each crime
scene across a spectrum of several murders. For example, when the killer
in one murder intentionally leaves the victim in a position so the
victim will be found open and displayed, posed physically spread-eagled
and vulnerable; or when he savagely beats that victim to a point of
overkill and violently rapes her with an iron rod". Part of the problem
was the List itself. It was very unlikely that one individual or group
of individuals was responsible for all of the murders and
disappearances. Comparing the abduction of LaTonya Wilson with the
stabbing death of Clifford Jones suggests very different perpetrators.
However, at least in some of the cases, it appeared that at least one or
possibly several unconnected serial killers were at work. As the
murders and disappearances continued relentlessly, various patterns did
emerge.

No End In Sight

Charles Stephens

Late in the evening of October 9, 1980, twelve-year-old
Charles Stephens had gone missing. He was found murdered the next
morning on a hillside. Stephens had died from suffocation from an
unknown object. At the crime scene, the evidence had been contaminated
by a police officer when he threw a blanket over the corpse of the boy.
The fibers from the blanket were mixed with the fibers already at the
scene. The fibers found were thought to have come from the red interior
of a Ford LTD.A drug dealer went to police a day
after Stephen's body was discovered. He told police that on the same day
Charles Stephens disappeared, he had gotten into the car of a client of
his to sell drugs. When the drug dealer looked into the back seat of
the car he saw a young boy lying lifeless with his head turned towards
the trunk and wrapped in a sheet. When the drug dealer asked about the
boy, the driver of the car became angry and told him the boy was merely
doped up and passed out.The drug dealer stated to
police that he was concerned about the boy because he didn't look doped
up but worse off, possibly dead. The driver of the car told the dealer
to forget what he saw. He later threatened the dealer with his life if
he had said anything about the boy in the backseat. It was then that the
dealer went to police and told them the story. He added that he knew
the man to be a pedophile and had on occasions been offered money to
find the driver young boys with whom he could have sex.In
mid-October, the skeletal remains of LaTonya Wilson were found in
northwest Atlanta, not too far from her home. It was impossible to
determine cause of death or whether she had been sexually abused given
the state of her body's decomposition.

Links

During the fall of 1980, the mayor of Atlanta issued a
citywide curfew. It was feared that the killer(s) would strike during
Halloween, possibly targeting trick-or-treaters as they walked the city
streets. The city patrols were stepped up in an effort to prevent
another murder. Unfortunately, all attempts failed when yet another body
had been discovered in the first week of November.

Aaron Jackson

Nine-year-old Aaron Jackson, a friend of earlier victim
Aaron Wyche, was found dead beneath a bridge in the South River in
November 1980, close to where Wyche's body had been discovered.
Jackson's cause of death was documented as "probable asphyxia." Like
Charles Stephens, it was believed that Aaron Jackson had been smothered.At
about the time Jackson was thought to have been killed, a woman had
witnessed a man at the scene where the body was later discovered. The
woman reported what she had been to the Task Force who, in turn, failed
to respond to the report. However, that was not the only error made by
police concerning this case. Throughout the investigation, details would
be consistently confused with the details concerning Jackson's friend's
case, Aaron Wyche. It seemed that the cause of the confusion stemmed
from the fact that the boys were very good friends and shared the same
first names.Aaron Jackson was later connected with
"Pat Man" Rogers, with whom he and Wyche were friends and neighbors. At
one time, "Pat Man" had a crush on Jackson's sister. Patrick "Pat Man"
Rogers was the next to go missing.

Patrick Rogers

Sixteen-year-old Patrick "Pat Man" Rogers was a karate
fanatic and singer. He was often spotted at Bruce Lee movies or singing
with his friend Junior Harper. He had known many people within his
neighborhood. He was also connected to at least seventeen murdered
victims, both on and off the List.Rogers had
disappeared on November 10, 1980. He, like other victims including
Darron Glass, was thought to have run away. Therefore he was not added
to the List for quite some time. A week before his disappearance, he had
told his mother that he had feared that the killer was close. His
friend's mother told police that Rogers was looking for her son to tell
him that he had found someone to manage their singing careers a man
named Wayne Williams. Rogers was found on December 21, 1980, face down
in the Chattahoochee River. He died from a blow to his head.

A Murderous Change of Pace

Dettlinger and Prugh stated in The List, that after
the death of Jackson, "no more preteen 'little boys' were added to the
List. The geography changed, too." Furthermore, the murders seemed to
move away from the center of the city to the outlying suburbs.

Lubie Geter

Lubie Geter disappeared in January of 1981. He was
fourteen-years-old. Even though he fit all the parameters required by
the authorities at the time to make the List, it took two days before
the police began their investigation of the crime scene after Geter's
body had been found in February of 1981. The body of Geter was extremely
decomposed when happened upon by a man walking his dog through the
woods. When he was found, he was only wearing his underwear. The medical
examiner believed that Lubie died from asphyxiation from manual
strangulation.Geter had been connected with two
white male pedophiles the child molester connected with earlier victim,
Earl Lee Terrell and another unidentified man, who would be later
connected to List victim William Barrett. An acquaintance of Geter had
seen him with the molester linked with Terrell on several occasions. The
convicted child molester that had been linked with Terrell was also
never a suspect in the murder case of Geter.

Terry Pue

Terry Pue was fifteen when he had disappeared in January
of 1981. He had been last seen at a hamburger restaurant on Memorial
Drive and was a friend of List victim Lubie Geter who had gone missing
the same month. An anonymous white caller had phoned the police and
informed them where they could find the boy's body. Pue was found near
interstate 20 on Sigman Road, in Atlanta. He had been strangled by some
sort of ligature. The same caller had also indicated that the remains of
another victim could be found on the same road. Years later, those
remains were finally located but never identified. Some suggested they
were the remains of still missing Darron Glass. The unidentified remains
were never added to the List, even though Pue's were.

Patrick Baltazar

Patrick Baltazar was eleven when he had disappeared on
February 6, 1981. A man cleaning up the grounds one week after he had
gone missing found Baltazar's body in an office park. The boy had been
strangled to death and the rope thought to have been the murder weapon,
lay close to the body. Before his death, the Task Force had received a
call from the boy; saying that he believed the killer was coming after
him. Unfortunately, the Task Force failed to respond. One wonders if
Baltazar would still be alive today if they had responded. After
Baltazar had gone missing, his teacher had claimed she had received a
phone call from a boy she thought to be Baltazar. The boy never said who
he was, he merely cried into the receiver of the phone.

Curtis Walker

That same month, thirteen-year-old Curtis Walker
disappeared and was immediately added to the List. Curtis had lived with
his mother and uncle at the Bowen Homes housing project in Atlanta.
Both he and his uncle, Stanley Murray, would be murdered. Curtis would
make the now infamous List, but his uncle would not. His body was found
on March 6, 1981 in the South River. His death, like many of the other
List victims, would be documented as caused by asphyxia, probably
strangulation with a cord or narrow rope. That same day, FBI agents
found the remains of Jefferey Mathis, missing almost a year. His funeral
was captured on national news.

The Jo-Jo Connection

Joseph (Jo-Jo) Bell

Joseph (Jo-Jo) Bell was fifteen when he disappeared on
March 2, 1981. Two days after he had gone missing a co-worker of his,
who worked at a popular seafood restaurant named Cap'n Peg's, told his
manager that Jo-Jo had called him and told him he was "almost dead." The
boy said Jo-Jo had pleaded for his co-worker to help him, before
hanging up the phone. The manager reported the call to police. Several
days later, Jo-Jo's mother received a call from a woman who said she had
Jo-Jo. The same woman had called back and spoke with Mrs. Bell's two
other children. Mrs. Bell immediately called the Task Force, who never
contacted her back. Frustrated, she contacted the F.B.I., but it was too
late. Jo-Jo was found on April 19, 1981 in the South River. His cause
of death was "probable asphyxia."Jo-Jo was linked to
several victims on and off the List. His mother had befriended a fellow
inmate while serving time for murdering her husband. That woman
happened to be the sister of Alfred Evans. Jo-Jo had gone to summer camp
with Cynthia Montgomery, a murdered victim who had not made the List,
but could be connected to many victims who had made the List. Jo-Jo was
also good friends with Timothy Hill, a very troubled young man with
violent tendencies, who disappeared eleven days after Jo-Jo. He and
Timothy Hill were known to frequent a house on Gray Street known as
Uncle Tom's. A sixty-three year-old homosexual man named Thomas Terrell,
who was known to have a particular interest in young boys, owned the
house.

Timothy Hill

Timothy Hill, Jo-Jo's friend, disappeared that same
month. Tom Terrell's next-door neighbor saw Timothy the day before he
disappeared on March 12, 1981. A young man who had also known Timothy
and Tom told police that the two frequently engaged in sex together. Tom
would usually pay thirteen-year-old Timothy for sexual favors. Terrell
himself admitted to police that he had engaged in sexual acts with the
boy. Another witness reported to police that Timothy spent the night at
Terrell's after missing his bus the day before he was reported missing.
That same witness was the last to see Timothy. He claimed that the night
before he disappeared, he saw from his window Timothy talking with a
teenage girl.Timothy was found on March 30, 1981 in
the Chattahoochee River. He was the last child victim to be added to the
List. His cause of death was also listed as asphyxia. Terrell was never
suspected in the disappearance or murder of Timothy or Jo-Jo. Timothy
was later linked with Alfred Evans, Jefferey Mathis, Patrick Baltazar
and Anthony Carter.Throughout the horrible series of
murders, the children began to get older. Also, rivers fast became the
favored dumping ground for victims. Suddenly, there were no more child
victims. Were the safety education programs and curfew finally working?
Or had the murderer's taste simply matured?

Chaos

That same year, residents of a housing project named
Techwood Homes took to the streets in protest that the police were not
doing their jobs in protecting the public. The group of residents
decided to take matters into their own hands and they formed a "bat
patrol." The patrol was made up of residents armed with baseball bats,
hoping to prevent murders from happening in their community. Sadly, the
resident's attempts, like the authorities, had also failed to prevent
the murders from occurring. On the exact day that the residents had
taken up "bat patrol" and in the very housing project in which it was
formed, another person named Eddie (Bubba) Duncan disappeared.

Eddie Duncan

The first adult to make the List was twenty-one-year old
Eddie (Bubba) Duncan. He disappeared on March 20, 1981 and was found
dead on April 8, 1981. He, like Timothy Hill, had been dumped in the
Chattahoochee River. Eddie had several physical and intellectual
handicaps. With Duncan's death, the parameters of the List changed to
encompass older victims. Before this period, other victims who were
young adults were left off the List because they were considered "too
old." Those earlier young adult victims were never added, even after the
parameters changed. Once again the medical examiner guessed; "probable
asphyxia" was documented. And, Eddie Duncan was also connected with
another list victim, "Pat Man" Rogers.

Mayor Jackson with the reward money

Immense sums of money were offered as rewards to help
find the killer(s) at large. Much of the money was donated or raised by
corporations and famous figures, such as Muhammad Ali, Burt Reynolds and
Gladys Knight and the Pips. In 1981, President Reagan issued more than
two million dollars to the city of Atlanta and the Task Force to use
towards the investigation and for citizens who needed help in dealing
with the stress of the murders. Other monies that were donated and
raised were mostly used to help in the investigation, as well as to help
the families of the List victims. Unfortunately, only a few of the
victim's families ever received the money that was raised or donated.
The city and nonprofit organizations poorly controlled the money. Much
of the money fell through the cracks of the system, misplaced or lost
all together. However, despite the massive flow of money into the city
to help put an end to the murders, they still continued.

Larry Rogers

The second adult to make the infamous List was
twenty-year-old Larry Rogers (no relation to Patrick Rogers). He turned
up dead after missing for more than two weeks in April 1981. He was not
found in a river, like the three victims before him, but in an abandoned
apartment. His cause of death was documented as "probable asphyxia, by
strangulation." Rogers was mentally retarded.Rogers
was one of the few victims to be connected to Wayne Williams.
Supposedly, Williams had hidden the younger brother of Larry Rogers,
from police. The younger Rogers had been involved in a violent fight in
which he suffered a head injury. It was Wayne Williams, in fact that had
taken him to the hospital. Williams overheard on his police scanner
news of the fight and had beaten the police to the scene. Williams had
picked up the mother of the boys and took her to his apartment where
young Rogers was. Mrs. Rogers would later testify against Williams at
his trial. The apartment that Williams had taken her to was close by to
the place where her older son was later found dead.

A Deadly April

Michael McIntosh

Twenty-three year old ex-convict, Michael McIntosh, was
last seen on March 25, 1981, by a shop owner who said that the young man
had been beaten up. The storeowner had said McIntosh told him two black
men had roughed him up. He was never seen alive again. McIntosh had
lived across the street from Cap'n Peg's Seafood Restaurant, where Jo-Jo
had worked. He had, in fact, known Jo-Jo Bell. Like Jo-Jo, McIntosh had
been known to hang around with homosexuals and it was believed he was
one himself. He had been seen several times at Tom Terrell's house, a
house that both Jo-Jo Bell and Timothy Hill had often frequented.McIntosh
was pulled from the Chattahoochee River in April 1981. He too had died
from "probable asphyxia," according to the medical examiner. McIntosh
had known another List victim named Nathaniel Cater, who would disappear
a month later.

John Porter

John Porter, like McIntosh, was an ex-convict. He spent
much of his time with his grandmother with whom he lived with on and
off. She had kicked him out of the house on several occasions because of
his strange behavior. He had been suffering from severe mental problems
and had spent a length of time in a mental hospital. He was kicked out
shortly before he had disappeared because his grandmother had found him
fondling a 2-year-old-boy she was caring for in her home. He was
twenty-eight when he was found dead in April 1981. He had been stabbed
six times and left on a sidewalk in an empty lot. Porter originally did
not make the List, until the Wayne Williams trial when he and Williams
were linked through fiber matches.

Jimmy Ray Payne

Twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne had also disappeared
the same month as Porter. Police reports stated that his sister last
saw Payne the day before his disappearance. He had shared an apartment
with his sister and mother. His sister told police that he was on his
way to sell old coins at a coin shop. However, Payne's girlfriend had
claimed to see him the very day he had supposedly disappeared. She told
to jurors that he had walked her to the bus stop the morning of April
22. She had become worried when he did not pick her up from the bus
stop, as they had planned to meet there. Payne had been known to suffer
bouts of depression, especially during his incarceration while serving a
sentence for burglary. Payne, at one time, had attempted to hang
himself with his bed sheets, yet failed to succeed when a social worker
found him. He had survived that one brush of death, but would not live
for long afterwards. Payne was found a week after his disappearance
floating in the Chattahoochee River. His cause of death was reported as
"undetermined," according to the county medical examiner. It was
believed that he had been in the water almost the entire length of time
he had been missing.

The Last to Make the List

William (Billy Star) Barrett

William Barrett (Billy Star) was a seventeen-year-old
juvenile delinquent when he had vanished in May of 1981. He vanished on
his way to pay a bill for his mother. The following day, his body was
found close to his home. He had been both strangled and stabbed. The
medical examiner reported that the stabbing occurred after Billy died
from strangulation.Earlier police reports stated
that threats by a "hit man" had been made against Barrett. Barrett had
also been connected to a white man previously convicted of pedophilia.
The same man was also said to have known List victim Lubie (Chuck)
Geter. A witness had seen Geter on several occasions at the suspect's
apartment. The same man had also been witnessed at Barrett's funeral.

Nathaniel Cater

Ex-convict Nathaniel Cater was
twenty-seven years old when he became the last victim to make the List.
He had lived in the same apartment building as LaTonya Wilson. It is
unknown as to exactly when Cater had disappeared. What authorities did
know was that he was an admitted homosexual prostitute, drug dealer and
alcoholic. A witness, who had known the suspect in the death of Clifford
Jones, said Cater had admitted to selling himself, his blood at the
blood bank and dope, in exchange for money.

Dettlinger and His Map

Jeff Prugh (L) & Chet Dettlinger (R)

Dettlinger, an ex-police officer, public safety
commissioner and consultant for the U.S. Justice Department, led a
voluntary investigation into the Atlanta murders beginning from 1980 and
continuing until Wayne Williams's incarceration. Dettlinger volunteered
his services first to the police who refused him and later to the
mothers who accepted his help to try and put an end to the murders.
Dettlinger teamed up with Dick Arena, an ex-crime analyst, and private
investigators Bill Taylor and Mike Edwards, along with the help of other
volunteers, to assist in the investigation. Dettlinger and his group of
volunteers completed much of the "leg work" the police didn't do,
including going door-to-door in the neighborhoods where victims lived
and disappeared, asking questions and seeking leads and connections into
the murders. What Dettlinger discovered was a definite pattern
including all of the victims on the List and many victims who never made
the List.Dettlinger's findings were significant in
that they recognized a social and geographic pattern between the
victims. During the peak of the Atlanta murders, he was able to predict
with a degree of accuracy where victims would disappear and be found.
Task Force Agents and police, who refused to acknowledge any connections
among the cases, either geographic or social, at one point suspected
Dettlinger in the murders. However, he was quickly released when
authorities realized the information and knowledge Dettlinger had and
which they lacked came from their own incompetence, mis-assimilation of
information and mismanagement with the handling of the investigation.
The FBI later used Dettlinger as an expert consultant, realizing that he
knew more vital facts concerning the investigation than the police
department.Dettlinger first began his map of murder
victims in the summer of 1980 who had initially made the List. However,
he quickly discovered that there were many that police had left off that
were worth examination. Dettlinger's list of victims had well
outnumbered the Task Force's list. Several of those victims who had been
first ignored by Task Force Agents, such as Aaron Wyche and Patrick
Rogers had made Dettlinger's list soon after their disappearance. Some
of those names were later added by Task Force Agents due to increasing
pressure by Dettlinger, who was able to provide them with information
they lacked that allowed them to later connect the cases.Dettlinger
mapped out the precise location of where the victims had lived, where
they had disappeared and where they had been found. By doing this he
discovered that the victims were connected to Memorial Drive and eleven
other major streets centered in that immediate area. Dettlinger had also
recognized that the murders moved in an eastwardly direction.After
Patrick Rogers' death, the victims that were found were older and their
bodies were disposed of further outside the city limits. However,
Dettlinger and Prugh are quoted in their book, The List as
saying, "The streets didn't change, but it was necessary only to extend
the streets on the map, not add new ones. Even those Chattahoochee and
South River findings would occur at bridges carrying one of the streets
on the map." Therefore, the parameters basically remained the same
despite the ages of the victims.

A Splash From the Bridge

"It" happened in the early morning hours of Friday, May 22,
1981 at the James Jackson Parkway Bridge that crossed over the
Chattahoochee River where previous bodies had been found. Two police
officers were staked out at the bridge in an effort to monitor
suspicious activities. Officer Freddie Jacobs was stationed on the
Fulton County side or southern part of the bridge. Officer Bob Campbell
was stationed beneath the bridge at the northerly Cobb County side of
the bridge. Officer Jacobs saw the headlights of a car approaching
southbound over the bridge. At about that same time, Officer Campbell
heard a car driving over the bridge. Campbell heard a splash in the
water. It was the splash that had sent ripples around the world and
would mark the beginning of one of the most famous trials in recent
times.

Jackson Parkway Bridge

According to Officer Jacobs, he had seen a car's
headlights as it was driving over the bridge and was soon after radioed
by his colleague Campbell, who had told him that he had heard a loud
splash in the water. Jacobs recognized the slow moving vehicle as a
white 1970 Chevrolet station wagon. He watched as the vehicle drove over
the bridge into Fulton County, where there stood in view a liquor
store. He watched as the car turned around and re-crossed the bridge. At
the liquor store a veteran Atlanta police officer named Carl Holden was
on watch for suspicious activity when he spotted the station wagon. He
had followed it as it crossed the bridge into Cobb County.According
to Campbell, he heard a loud splash, unlike the sound that some of the
river animals made when they dove in the water, and noticing ripples in
the water made from whatever had landed in the river. He saw a car
standing on the bridge. Then the car turned its headlights on above the
area where he had heard the splash and had seen the ripples. He then
radioed FBI Agent Greg Gilliland, who pulled the car over almost a half
mile from the bridge. Holden had still been following the car from
behind when it was pulled over. The driver of the station wagon was
Wayne Williams.Williams, almost
twenty-three-years-old, was a freelance photographer and music promoter
who said he was traveling across the bridge to find the home of a
potential client with whom he had an appointment several hours later. He
told the police the woman's name was Cheryl Johnson and that he
intended to audition her with the possibility of promoting her as a
singer. However, agents did not believe his story, particularly when the
phone number was incorrect and the address didn't exist. Williams
allowed the authorities to search the car. For over an hour, Williams
was questioned about what he was doing on the bridge and his reason for
being in the area.Several hours later, officers
dragged the Chattahoochee River around the bridge, but they found no
evidence of a body. The next day, police again questioned Williams and
began to realize that they were dealing with a most unusual man.

Wayne Bertram Williams

Wayne Bertram Williams

Wayne Williams, born on May 27, 1958, was the only child
of schoolteachers Homer and Faye Williams. The Williams family lived in
Dixie Hills, a neighborhood where many of Atlanta's murder victims had
once lived or from where they had disappeared.His
parents doted on him and spent every cent they had supporting his
entrepreneurial ventures. From a young age, Williams dreamed of making
it big in the broadcasting and entertainment industry. A talented and
motivated young man, Williams began his own radio station at the age of
sixteen from his parent's home.He graduated from
Fredrick Douglas High School with an honors degree and attended Georgia
State University for one year before dropping out. In his late teens he
worked for a popular radio station and appeared in [Jet] magazine along
with his employer, Benjamin Hooks, an influential black leader at the
time who eventually headed the NAACP. Williams spent much of his time
marketing his own station and promoting local musical talent, performing
odd jobs to fund his ideas and experimenting with electronics, which
was his hobby.Williams had also sold video footage
and photographs of area accidents, such as fires, car accidents and even
one plane crash, to local television stations to earn money. He would
hear about many of the accidents from his police radio scanner, which
allowed him to make it to scenes of accidents sometimes before the
police had even arrived.

Up to No Good

Wayne's dream was to find the next Jackson Five or Stevie
Wonder and ride that talent to fame and wealth as their promoter and
manager. He spent much of his time talent scouting among black youth and
recording the works of the boys he believed had promise. Unfortunately,
he did not have the ear to select musicians with enough talent to make
it commercially. Nonetheless, he continued to spend his parents into
bankruptcy creating expensive demo recordings of boys with mediocre
abilities.Wayne was known around town as a
pathological liar and a bullshitter, suggesting that he had major record
deals cooking and knew the right people to make it big.Socially,
Wayne lived with his parents and had few friends. Bernard Headley tells
of an interesting aspect of Wayne's life that is typical behavior of
serial killers: "He had acquired, for instance, an uncanny ability to
impersonate a police officer. The practice got him into trouble back in
1976, when he was arrested in the city (but never convicted) for
"impersonating a police officer and unauthorized use of a vehicle." The
vehicle had been illegally equipped with red lights beneath the grille
and flashing blue dashboard lights.There were rumors that he was homosexual, but nothing to substantiate them.Dettlinger
says that in the days immediately following the event on the bridge,
Wayne and his father "did a major cleanup job around their house. They
carried out boxes and carted them off in the station wagon. They burned
negatives and photographic prints in the outdoor grill."

Building the Case

On May 24,1981, the nude body of Nathaniel Cater, who had
disappeared a few days earlier, was discovered in the Chattahoochee
River. The medical examiner had once again documented the cause of death
as being "probable asphyxia." He was unable to establish the time frame
in which Cater had expired. Therefore, it was not really known exactly how Cater had died or when,
but only that he had stopped breathing for some unknown reason. The
medical examiner obliged the police by stating that Cater had been dead
just long enough for Wayne Williams to have thrown him off the bridge
several days earlier.Based on the discovery of the
body and the "splash" from the bridge, police theorized that Williams
had killed Nathaniel Cater and had thrown him off the bridge the night
they had pulled him over. Interestingly, four witnesses would later come
forward to the police saying that they saw Cater alive after Williams
supposedly threw his body from the bridge. This critical information was
not shared with Williams's lawyers.The authorities
monitored Williams' actions on a continuous basis while they got the
necessary search warrants for his home and cars. Throughout the string
of murders, a large number of fibers had been found on the various
bodies of the victims. The FBI wanted to determine if any of the fibers
from Wayne Williams' environment matched the fibers taken from the
murder victims. Also, a few victims had dog hair on them. Samples of the
hair from Williams' dog were taken for comparison.When
the FBI took Williams in for questioning, without a lawyer present,
they grilled him about his activities on the night of the bridge
incident. Williams told them he played basketball that afternoon at the
Ben Hill Recreation Center and then went home. Later in the afternoon,
Williams said he got a call from a woman who called herself Cheryl
Johnson who wanted to audition for him. She supposedly gave him a phone
number and address in Smyrna and arranged to meet Williams at her
apartment at 7 A.M. the following morning. He said he stayed at home
until he went to the Sans Souci Lounge after midnight to pick up his
tape recorder from the manager. He said that he left the Sans Souci when
the manager was too busy to see him. Then he told the FBI that he was
going to look for Cheryl Johnson's apartment and drove around Smyrna
looking for the Spanish Trace Apartments in which she said she lived.
When he couldn't find the apartments, he said he stopped at a liquor
store and called the phone number she gave him, but the number was busy.
Later, he stopped again to call her, but that time the phone rang
without answer.Then Williams drove onto the Jackson
Parkway bridge and went to a Starvin' Marvin to call Cheryl Johnson
again. This time, Williams claimed, someone did answer but said that it
was the wrong number. So then, Williams said he went back toward the
bridge when the officers stopped him for questioning.

Pulling it Together

Some of the problems with Williams' story were that the
Cheryl Johnson part was hard to believe and the claims to have been at
the Ben Hill Recreation Center and the Sans Souci before the bridge
incident were false. When the authorities checked, they could find no
Cheryl Johnson and no Spanish Trace Apartments and the phone number for
her was bogus.The FBI gave Wayne Williams three
separate polygraph tests, all of which indicated that Williams was being
deceptive in his answers.Williams surprised
everybody when he suddenly called a news conference at his home and
handed reporters a lengthy resume much of which was exaggerated and
some of which was false. He told the media that he was innocent and that
the authorities were just trying to find a scapegoat. This was the
beginning of a huge, continuous media event outside the Williams' home,
which went on for quite some time.During that time,
FBI laboratories claimed that they were coming up with a number of
matches between the fibers found on the victims and the fibers from
Williams' home and cars. Also, the labs claimed similarity between the
dog hairs on the victims and hair from Williams' dog.The
FBI was very excited about the fiber and dog hair evidence, but the
district attorney of Fulton County, Lewis Slaton, was not so impressed.
He did not want to prosecute a case on fiber evidence alone. This was
such a major case and fiber evidence could be very confusing and
unsatisfying to a jury. He wanted more traditional evidence, such as
eyewitnesses, fingerprints, etc. It's entirely possible that Slaton may
not have been thrilled to have the FBI telling him what to do in his own
county. It was, after all, Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, who in
desperation had brought in the Feds, not Slaton.Several things helped persuade Slaton to finally go after Wayne Williams:

A
number of witnesses materialized who swore they saw Williams with
various victims. Hard to say why they had not come forward before, since
none of the Task Force documents included a note on Wayne Williams.
Williams had not been a suspect until the bridge incident.

A
couple of recording studio people claimed to have seen serious-looking
cuts and scratches on Williams' arms, suggesting the potential of a
struggle with the boy victims

Pressure by Georgia Governor George Busbee to play ball with the Feds.

On
June 21, William's lawyer, Mary Welcome and two county policemen went
to Williams' home with the arrest warrant. Interestingly, Wayne Williams
was indicted for the murder of two adults, Jimmy Payne and Nathaniel
Cater. However, Georgia law allows that the prosecution can bring into
court evidence from other cases if it could be proven that those other
cases were part of a "pattern." That was how Slaton would tie in the
murders of the children an activity that would create controversy for
years to come.

Gearing UpPopular black attorney
Mary Welcome, a former city solicitor, was the first lawyer on Wayne
Williams' defense team. Initially she chose Tony Axam, an experienced
attorney on major cases, to complement her skills. However, Williams
fired Axam and Mary replaced him with Alvin Binder, a capable, but
abrasive white lawyer from Mississippi.

Judge Clarence Cooper, the first black judge elected to
the Fulton County bench, had been an assistant district attorney for a
number of years and was a prot�g� of District Attorney and prosecutor
Lewis Slaton. Interestingly, Fulton County announced that a computer
program randomly selected a black judge who just happened to be pals
with the prosecution to be the judge on the Wayne Williams trial. Jack
Mallard was the most active member of Slaton's prosecution team.One
very controversial situation was that in the case of Jimmy Payne, the
Fulton County medical examiner had written that the cause of death was
"undetermined." That is, it was not determined that Payne was, in fact,
murdered. Recognizing the difficulty in prosecuting Williams for a death
that was not clearly a homicide, the medical examiner conveniently
changed his document to indicate "homicide."Dettlinger
points out that when confronted with the change in the death
certificate which subsequently allowed for Wayne Williams to be
indicted in the Jimmy Payne case the medical examiner said he "checked
the wrong box" on the death certificate." However, there is no box to
check on the death certificate, only a place to type in the word
"undetermined" or "homicide."

The Trial

The trial began on December 28, 1981. The jury was composed
of nine women and three men; eight jurors were black and four were
white. They were sequestered for the duration of the trial. Opening
arguments began in the first week of January 1982.The
defense team was severely handicapped by lack of funds and woefully
insufficient time to interview hundreds of prosecution witnesses. They
did not have the money to employ the quality of expert witnesses to
rebut the vast laboratory findings of the FBI and Georgia crime bureau.
Furthermore, the body of forensic evidence on fibers was an order of
magnitude greater than what the defense had expected. The cornerstone of
the prosecution's case was the fiber evidence, which was highly
technical and carried with it the prestige of the FBI laboratories. To
successfully cast doubt on the fiber evidence, expensive, very high
caliber expert testimony would have been required. Williams' defense
team simply didn't have that kind of money.Also,
even though the defense team knew that the prosecution was going to
bring in other cases besides the deaths of Cater and Payne, they didn't
know how many and which cases would be introduced. For a defense team
short on time and short on money, this was a real problem. Dettlinger,
who was on the defense team, states: "During the trial, we didn't know
who the next witness presented by the state would be or what he or she
would be testifying about."The "Brady" files is the
body of information collected by the police and other forensic experts
that points towards the innocence of the accused. By law, the
prosecution must turn those Brady files over to the defense before the
trial begins. The arbiter of what would be included in the Brady files
and when it would be turned over was Judge Clarence Cooper, the D.A.'s
former prot?. Not surprisingly, the Brady files were withheld until the
last possible minute.For example,
thirty-nine-year-old Jimmy Anthony was a neighbor who had known
Nathaniel Cater and claimed to have seen him on the morning of May 23
the day after Williams was pulled over for supposedly throwing
Cater's body off the bridge. Anthony said Cater told him that he had
found a new job. One might suspect that Anthony was mistaken about the
time that he had last seen Cater. Yet, three other witnesses, one, who
had known Cater well, had also seen him after the bridge incident. Not
one of these witnesses would later have a chance to testify in the
Williams case. The jury would not be informed of the four witnesses who
had seen Nathaniel Cater, as well as many other important suspects and
witnesses connected with the case that would have cast doubt on
Williams' guilt.Regarding the time of death of
Nathaniel Cater, the defense brought in its own expert who lost
credibility when he announced that Cater had been in the water for at
least two weeks. Cater had not even been missing for two weeks. A
similar thing happened when the defense's expert estimated Jimmy Payne's
death.

Patterns

Atlanta's Public Safety Commissioner Lee Brown had always
maintained throughout the investigation that there was no pattern in the
murders. Ironically, it was during Brown's testimony that Jack Mallard
introduced the "pattern" that would allow evidence in ten other cases to
be introduced in addition to evidence in the Cater and Payne deaths.
The "pattern" became the key enabler for evidence to be used by the
state against Williams, especially when linking similar fibers.
Furthermore, the Cater and Payne cases standing alone were extremely
weak and the introduction of evidence from each of the ten "pattern"
cases strengthened their case by providing, among many things,
eyewitnesses and most importantly, fiber connections amongst some of the
victims.The ten "pattern" cases were:

Alfred Evans

Eric Middlebrooks

Charles Stephens

William Barrett

Terry Pue

John Porter

Lubie Geter

Joseph Bell

Patrick Baltazar

Larry Rogers

The characteristics that formed the "pattern" amongst the victims were listed by the prosecution as being:

Black male

Missing clothing

No car

Poor families

No evidence of forced abduction

Broken Home

No apparent motive for disappearance

Defendant claims no contact

Asphyxia by strangulation

No valuables

Body found near expressway ramp or major artery

Street hustlers

�Body disposed of in unusual manner

Transported before or after death

Similar fibers

There
was a great deal of controversy concerning the prosecution's "pattern."
Furthermore, if one looked closely into each of the cases, it would be
noticeable that several of them did not fit the "pattern" invented by
the prosecution. For example, not all of the victims were found near
expressway ramps or major arteries, it is unknown whether all the
victims were transported before of after they were killed based on lack
of evidence and only six of the "pattern" cases showed evidence of
strangulation. Therefore, the pattern the prosecution describes is
inaccurate. But Judge Cooper, former prosecutor, accepted the "pattern"
anyway.The prosecution focused its efforts on four key areas:

the character and credibility of Wayne Williams,

what happened on the Jackson Parkway bridge,

eyewitnesses to Wayne Williams behavior and alleged interaction with the victims, and

the
physical evidence, which was primarily based on fibers, hairs and
bloodstains found on victims that matched elements in Wayne Williams
environment.

Damaging Testimony

While Wayne Williams did not have a criminal record, his
character was not exactly unblemished in the eyes of those who knew him.
Most people knew Wayne Williams as a person who either lied about or
vastly exaggerated his accomplishments. As an example, Eustis Blakely, a
successful black businessman and his wife were friends of Wayne. Wayne
told Blakely that he flew fighter jets at Dobbins Air Force base.
Blakely knew that was a lie because he had been in the Air Force and was
not able to fly planes because he wore glasses. Wayne Williams eyes
were much worse than Blakely's.But the real
showstopper during the trial was what his wife had to say about Wayne.
She had asked Williams after he had become a suspect, "If they get
enough evidence, will you confess before you get hurt? She said that he
answered "yes." She then went on to say that Wayne told her "he could
knock out black street kids in a few minutes by putting his hand on
their necks."On cross-examination, Binder asked her
if she implied that Wayne had killed someone. She answered, "Yes, I do. I
really feel that Wayne Williams did kill somebody, and I'm sorry."Gino
Jordon, who ran the San Souci club, was asked if Wayne Williams had
been at his club before the bridge incident, as Williams had told
authorities he had been. Jordon said it was not that night of the bridge
incident, but the following night that Williams came by the club to
pick up his tape recorder. The club cashier confirmed Jordon's
statement.When the man in charge of the Ben Hill
Recreation Center was asked if Wayne Williams was playing basketball the
evening of the bridge incident as Williams had claimed, the answer
again was no.These two testimonies reflected that
Wayne Williams was lying about what he did before the incident on the
bridge. This lack of an alibi played right into the prosecution's theory
that Williams was with Cater that evening and dropped his body off the
bridge.What Williams was left with were a bunch of
lies about what he did before the bridge incident and an explanation
about what he was doing on the bridge that nobody believed. Attempts to
find the mysterious Cheryl Johnson led most people to believe that she
was nonexistent.

Mounting Evidence

Later into the trail, the prosecution presented a group of
eyewitnesses who claimed they saw Wayne Williams with various victims or
that the eyewitness verified that Cater was alive the afternoon of the
bridge incident:Examples of this eyewitness
testimony included Lugene Laster, who saw Jo-Jo Bell get into a
Chevrolet station wagon driven by a man he identified as Wayne Williams.
Robert Henry, who knew Cater, claimed he saw Cater and Williams holding
hands the evening of the bridge incident. Also, a couple of youths
claimed Williams made sexual advances to them.One of
the most significant and controversial moments of the trial occurred
during arguments and testimony concerning the linkage of similar fibers
amongst the ten "pattern" cases to Cater and Payne's murder.
Investigators found on the bodies of the murdered victims fibers that
were similar in appearance to carpet fibers found in Williams home and
automobile. In total, there were twenty-eight fiber types linked to
nineteen items from the house, bedroom and vehicles of Wayne Williams.
Of interest to the prosecution were trilobal fibers, which the state
contended, were of a rare variety. Fiber analysts speculated that the
fibers found on the victims were most likely transferred to the victims
from contact with Williams's environment, thus connecting him to the
murders. The prosecution contended that there were so many fiber matches
between the Williams' household and the victims that it was
statistically impossible for the victims not to have been in Williams'
home and cars.Controversy arose when the state
failed to tell the jury that most of the fibers found on the victims
were not rare. In fact, such carpet fibers could be found in many
apartment building complexes, businesses and residential homes
throughout the Atlanta region. Therefore, it would not be that unusual
for the victims to have come in contact with trilobal type fibers. There
was more controversy over the transference of such fibers. The state
argued that fibers were transferred directly from Williams's environment
to the victims. Therefore, one must assume that if fibers could be
transferred from Williams's environment to the victims, then fibers from
the victims clothing or living environment would naturally be found on
Williams or in his home or car, especially, if they had been killed in
his house or transported in his car, which the state believed to have
happened. Yet, absolutely no evidence of hair or fibers from the victims
was found in Williams's house or car.

On the Stand

Later in the trial, the state informed jurors that five
bloodstains had been found in the station wagon driven by Williams.
Prosecutors claimed that the blood droplets matched in type and enzyme
to the blood of victims William Barrett and John Porter. There was
controversy among analysts as to the exact age of the droplets of blood
found in the car. If the droplets occurred within an eight-week period,
which one analyst believed, then it could have been likely that the
blood came from Barrett and Porter who had died within that period.
However, another analyst testified that it was virtually impossible to
date the stains and if by any chance they had occurred outside of the
eight-week frame then it was highly unlikely that the blood came from
either victim.When it came to the issue of motive,
in the absence of any definitive evidence of sexual assault of the
victims, the prosecution claimed that Wayne Williams hated black youths.
Of course, this does not explain the murder of Nathaniel Cater who was
27-years-old not really a youth and several years older than Williams.
Various people testified to remarks that Williams allegedly made over
the years that criticized the behavior of black people and black
youngsters in particular.The defense called quite a
number of witnesses. For example, they put the hydrologist on the stand
that determined that it was "highly unlikely" that the body of Nathaniel
Cater had been thrown off the Parkway bridge, considering where Cater's
body was found. The hydrologist was incensed that the county had
pressured his colleague into changing his report to reflect just the
opposite.Also, the defense presented an expert
witness who testified that there was no indication that either Cater or
Payne had been murdered. One of the two victims had an enlarged heart
and could have died of natural causes. Both or either men could have
simply drowned. Cater was a known alcoholic and drug taker.The
defense also put on the stand a number of witnesses that either
rebutted what prosecution witnesses had said about where Williams was at
a particular time or testified that Williams behavior was strictly
kosher with the boys who he tried to develop into musicians. Another
witness was the police sketch artist who testified that none of the
dozens of suspects that she was asked to sketch looked anything like
Williams. A college student recruited by Williams for a singing job
testified that Williams disliked homosexuals and expected that his
client had a high standard of morals.

Going Down!

Williams was put on the stand to defend himself against the
charges and some of the eyewitness accounts. Also, he wanted to point
out to the jury that he couldn't have quickly stopped the car on the
bridge, opened up the back of the car and hoisted Cater, who was much
larger and heavier than Williams, over the shoulder-high guard railings
on the side of the bridge.The goal of William's
testimony was to demonstrate to the jury that he did not have the
temperament to commit the murders. However, Jack Mallard repeatedly
succeeded in making Williams visibly angry and provoking Williams into
verbally insulting the government agents on the case. His show of temper
had a big negative impact on the jury.Williams'
defense team was unable to undo the damage that had been done, both by
the state's case and the poor preparation of their own case. The
prosecution had provided the jury with a mountain of evidence compared
to what the defense team had. Even though the quality of the evidence
presented by the prosecution was doubtful, the sheer quantity of it
seemed to overwhelm the jurors. Furthermore, jurors never heard most of
the exculpatory evidence from the Brady files that could have changed
the outcome of the trial. Prosecutors withheld the files for as long as
they legally could, which hardly allowed any time for the defense to
prepare a strong case.

Wayne Williams

In January of 1982, Wayne Bertram Williams was found
guilty for the murder of Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater. He is
currently serving two life sentences. Following Williams' sentencing,
the Atlanta police announced that twenty-two of the twenty-nine murders
were solved with the presumption that Wayne Williams was responsible.But that was not the end of the case by any means.

Fiber Analysis

Cross transfers of fiber often occur in cases in which there
is person-to-person contact, and investigators hope that fiber
traceable back to the offender can be found at the crime scene, as well
as vice versa. Success in solving the crime often hinges on the ability
to narrow the sources for the type of fiber found, as the prosecution
did with their probability theory on the fibers in the Williams case.The
problem with fiber evidence is that fibers are not unique. Unlike
fingerprints or DNA, they cannot pinpoint an offender in any definitive
manner. There must be other factors involved, such as evidence that the
fibers can corroborate or something unique to the fibers that set them
apart. For example, when fibers appeared to link two Ohio murders in the
1980s, it was just the start of building a case, but without the
fibers, there would have been no link in the first place.In
1982, Kristen Lea Harrison was abducted from a ball field in Ohio and
her body was found six days later some thirty miles away. She had been
raped and strangled. Orange fibers in her hair looked suspiciously like
those that had been found on a twelve-year-old female murder victim from
eight months earlier in the same county. Since they were made of
polyester and were oddly shaped (trilobal), forensic scientists surmised
that it was carpet fiber. In addition, a box found near Kristin's body
and plastic wrap around her feet indicated that the killer had once
ordered a special kind of van seat, but then leads dried up.Some
time later, a 28 year-old woman was abducted and held prisoner in a
man's home. He tortured her and appeared to be intent on killing her.
When he left, she escaped and reported him. Police noticed that he had a
van similar to the one into which Kristin had been forced. It proved to
have orange carpeting that matched the fibers in her hair. The color
was unique, which allowed scientists to trace it to a manufacturer who
supplied information about its limited run. Apparently only 74 yards of
it had been shipped to that area of Ohio. That helped to narrow down
possibilities. Other evidence established a more solid link and Robert
Anthony Buell, was eventually convicted.Fibers are
gathered at a crime scene with tweezers, tape, or a vacuum. They
generally come from clothing, drapery, wigs, carpeting, furniture, and
blankets. For analysis, they are first determined to be natural,
manufactured, or a mix of both.Natural fibers come
from plants (cotton) or animals (wool). Manufactured fibers are
synthetics like rayon, acetate, and polyester, which are made from long
chains of molecules called polymers. To determine the shape and color of
fibers from any of these fabrics, a microscopic examination is made.
Generally, the analyst gets only a limited number of fibers to work
withsometimes only one. Whatever has been gathered from the crime scene
is then compared against fibers from a suspect source, such as a car or
home, and the fibers are laid side by side for visual inspection through
a microscope.

Under a Microscope

A compound microscope uses light reflected from the surface
of a fiber and magnified through a series of lenses, while the
comparison microscope (two compound microscopes joined by an optical
bridge) is used for more precise identification. A different device, the
phase-contrast microscope, reveals some of the structure of a fiber,
while the various electron microscopes either pass beams through samples
to provide a highly magnified image, or reflect electrons off the
sample's surface. A scanning electron microscope converts the emitted
electrons into a photographic image for display. This affords high
resolution and depth of focus.Another useful
instrument is the spectrometer, which separates light into component
wavelengths. In 1859, two German scientists discovered that the spectrum
of every organic element has uniqueness to its constituent parts. By
passing light through something to produce a spectrum, the analyst can
read the resulting lines, called "absorption lines." That is, the
specific wavelengths that are selectively absorbed into the substance
are characteristic of its component molecules. Then a spectrophotometer
measures the light intensities, which yields a way to identify different
types of substances.A combination of these
instruments for the most effective forensic analysis is the
micro-spectrophotometer. The microscope locates minute traces or shows
how light interacts with the material under analysis. Linking this to a
computerized spectrophotometer increases the accuracy. The scientist can
get both a magnified visual and an infrared pattern at the same time,
which increases the number of identifying characteristics of any given
material.The first step in fiber analysis is to
compare color and diameter. If there is agreement, then the analysis can
go into another phase. Dyes can also be further analyzed with
chromatography, which uses solvents to separate the dye's chemical
constituents. Under a microscope, the analyst looks for lengthwise
striations or pits on a fiber's surface, or unusual shapes as with the
one short and two long arms of the trilobal fibers in the Williams case.In
short, the fiber analyst compares shape, dye content, size, chemical
composition, and microscopic appearances, yet all of this is still about
"class evidence." Even if fibers from two separate places can be
matched via comparison, that does not mean they derive from the same
source, and there is no fiber database that provides a probability of
origin.

Challenging Evidence

Since the Wayne Williams case pretty much came down to fiber
evidence, it's obviously open to serious challenge. Chet Dettlinger is a
former assistant to the Atlanta Chief of Police. He and a group of
other high-ranking ex-law-enforcement officers independently
investigated the case. Dettlinger, now a Georgia attorney, was asked by
Williams' defense lawyer, Al Binder, to act as a consultant, and he
co-authored, The List, the only book to be published on the case.
Among other problems, he saw glaring errors with the way the fiber
evidence was presented."The 'matching' fibers were
taken only from victims," he says. "Only one individual red cotton fiber
was found at the Williams home which can be found in abundance at
K-Mart or Walmart which is similar to fibers in victim Michael
McIntosh's underwear. That came from the vacuum sweepings of a car,
which the Williamses may or may not have owned at the time that McIntosh
was murdered. Not one fiber from any victim was found anywhere near the
carpet in the Williams' house."Insofar as the
Wellman fiber is concerned, they were attempting to demonstrate how rare
the fiber in the carpet in 'Wayne Williams' room' was. This ignores the
fact that all of the Williamses, and any regular visitor to the home,
existed in the same environment."Dettlinger goes on to pinpoint the central errors in the prosecution's probability analysis as:

They
ignored the fact that the same carpet was in all but one or two rooms
in the house, including the parents' bedroom and the living room.

They
overlooked the fact that Wayne Williams had changed rooms since the
last murder on their list. The room they identified as his was actually
used by a relative.

They
ignored the fact that even in residential applications many of the
exact same fibers were dyed the same color and used in rugs which are
not the same model number as those used in the Williams' house.

They
chose to narrow their analysis to a statistical area that doesn't exist
the southeast. They also failed to allow for the possibility that the
killer or killers lived elsewhere and traveled regularly to the area.

They
included only fibers said to have been used in carpets for residential
applications, ignoring the fact that the same fiber could be found in
many apartments and businesses.

They
ignored the fact that millions of pounds of the exact same fiber had
been sold undyed to other manufacturers for use in applications such as
car mats.

Probability

About the finer probability ration involving the car,
Dettlinger points out that, "the prosecution used metro Atlanta figures
to show how rare this vehicle would be. This means the Williams's
vehicle was not included because it was registered in Muscogee County,
which is far from Atlanta."In addition, since four
people had been in the Williams home regularly, that made four suspects,
not one. "The prosecution summed up by saying that even though the
fibers were common, it is the combination of fibers which could not be
found in any other environment except the Wayne Williams environment.
This gives us four or more suspects, not one, and more importantly: What
about a Laundromat where the environments of hundreds, perhaps
thousands of fibers are mixed and even clogged together in filters?
Clifford Jones was killed in the back room of a Laundromat."Clifford
Jones was the final blow to the state's fiber case. He was one of only
seven who had the even remotely-unique Wellman fiber. However, both the
FBI and the investigating officer agree with me that Jones was killed by
someone other than Williams and the Jones case was not introduced at
the trial even though the defense begged for its submission."Clearly the fiber probability ratio was not as impressive as it seemed.This
case was the first to have relied on this type of analysis for pivotal
evidence, and several appeals justices noted that it was too weak: There
were no eyewitnesses, weapon, motive, confession, or clear placement of
Williams with any of the victims prior to their deaths. Exactly what
did this evidence corroborate? It was not even that clear that the two
victims had been murdered, and both were adult males-completely unlike
any of the young boys used in the ten "pattern" cases. It seems obvious
from the many problems in this case that fiber alone should not be a
deciding factor.The same can be said for shafts of
hair that have only basic distinguishing characteristics. Nevertheless,
trace evidence does have its place, as seen in the following
investigation.

Reasonable Doubts

From the time that Wayne Williams was convicted, doubts
arose about his guilt. Many black Atlantans felt that the government had
manufactured the evidence just to get the case closed. While there are a
number of issues in the government's case that are controversial, the
fact is that the prosecutors, especially the FBI, believed that Williams
was guilty.Did the government play fair and square
during the trial? No, but that does not seem to be unusual, because
prosecution is about winning, not about justice or fairness in the
abstract. The facts are that no one ever witnessed Wayne Williams
killing or abducting anyone.The most important
evidence against him was highly technical fiber evidence that only
experts could judge. Any jury presented with the huge amount of fiber
evidence in the Williams case and the government's experts testifying to
its veracity would be likely to give it credence.Unfortunately,
Wayne Williams was his own worst enemy. He never came up with a
credible reason for being on the Jackson Parkway bridge in the early
hours of the morning and his alibis were easily destroyed, but it didn't
mean that he was guilty of murder.

Unfair Trial?

During the appeals process, the Georgia Supreme Court
assigned Justice Richard Bell to draft the opinion in the Williams case.
Justice Bell, a former prosecutor, wrote that Wayne Williams did not
get a fair trial and his murder conviction should have been reversed.
When the full court reviewed Bell's opinion, it was voted down; Bell's
draft was rewritten; Bell was pressured to change his vote, and the
majority opinion to uphold the conviction came out under Bell's name
in December of 1983.Justice Bell's unpublished draft
criticized Judge Clarence Cooper for allowing prosecutors to link
Williams to the murders of Eric Middlebrooks, John Porter, Alfred Evans,
Charles Stephens and Patrick Baltazar. The standards for linking those
crimes to the two for which Williams was charged were not met, according
to Bell.Specifically, Justice Bell said, according to Benjamin Weiser, Washington Post
writer (Feb. 3, 1985) that "there was no evidence placing Williams with
those five victims before their murders, and as in all the murders
linked to Williams, there were no eyewitnesses, no confession, no murder
weapons and no established motive. Also, the five deaths, while
somewhat similar to each other in technique, were unlike the two for
which Williams was tried."The linking of the other
crimes with the deaths of Cater and Payne had the effect of eroding the
presumption of innocence. Bell pointed out that "because the evidence of
guilt as to the two charged offenses was wholly circumstantial, and
because of the prejudicial impact of the five erroneously admitted
(uncharged) homicides must have been substantial, we cannot say that it
is highly probable that the error did not contribute to the jury's
verdict"The other dissenter was Justice George
Smith, who did not change his vote as Bell did. Justice Smith stated
that admitting the other crimes "illustrates the basic unfairness of
this trial and Williams' unenviable position as a defendant who, charged
with two murders, was forced to defend himself as to 12 separate
killings."In 1985, a five-hour CBS docudrama
severely ruffled the feathers of the Atlanta city government. The
producer made it clear in the movie that he believes that there were
"tremendous breaches of legal ethics" during the investigation and trial
and that Williams' guilt was not proven.

Race War?

Over the years, an increasing number of people connected
with the case do not believe that Wayne Williams is guilty, including
some of the relatives of the victims. DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney
Dorsey, who as an Atlanta homicide detective first searched Williams
home, says, " Most people who are aware of the child murders believe as I
do that Wayne Williams did not commit these crimes."In July of 1999, the Augusta Chronicle reported:"A
divided Georgia Supreme Court ruled that a state judge wrongly
dismissed two claims raised by Wayne Williams in his bid for a new trial
in the slayings of two Atlanta blacks 18 years ago. The 4-3 ruling
sends the case back to Judge Hal Craig to rule on Mr. Williams' claims
that prosecutors were guilty of misconduct and that his own attorneys
did not effectively represent him at his 1982 trial."Williams
and his lawyers are seeking DNA tests on the bloodstains found in his
cars, which prosecutors claimed were consistent with the blood types of
two victims who were stabbed.Throughout the murder
investigation there was a fear in the black community that the Ku Klux
Klan was responsible for the murders of the children and young adults.
There was also credence given to the theory that the CIA and/or FBI were
responsible.A police informant allegedly claimed
that Klan member Charles Sanders tried to recruit him into the racist
organization. Sanders allegedly told the man that the Klan was trying to
begin a race war by killing black children.Any
group that can blow up churches can and does murder children. Explosives
are a very efficient way of harming lots of people quickly with limited
risk of exposure. We have learned this from Timothy McVeigh in the
Oklahoma City bombing. However, individual murders are not a very
effective way to eradicate a large number of people, especially
considering the risks of being caught by a black community that was in a
heightened state of alarm. It seems unlikely that any white person(s)
could pull off all or most of these murders. He (or they) would have
been too obvious to have escaped attention during a two-year period.

More Than One

What seems more likely as the body of knowledge about serial
killers has vastly expanded in the twenty years since the murder series
began, is that all the murders were not done by one or even two people,
but that multiple criminals were at work during that 2-year period.
However, there does seem to be at least one prolific serial killer at
work amongst young and teenage boys.While there was
little or no evidence of sexual assault, many of the victims were
involved in homosexual activities, either to earn money or because it
was their sexual preference. Just because there was no evidence of
mutilation or sexual violence, it doesn't mean that the murders were not
sexually motivated. In fact, they probably were sexually motivated.The
killer must have been very expert in gaining the confidence of these
young victims. Successful serial killers become very expert at defusing
any concerns that a potential victim may have. Pedophiles have made the
control of young people into an art form. Whoever it was that was
responsible for the deaths of these young people had to move and live
and earn a living among them. And almost certainly this killer was a
black man, so as not to have attracted undue attention or raised
suspicions.Is this person still operating today?
Probably not. He may be dead. These crimes began at the beginning of the
AIDS epidemic and the killer may have been a victim of that dread
disease. In fact, AIDS killed several of the suspects that were known
pedophiles.

A New Investigation in 2005

Chief Louis Graham

DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham said he plans to reopen the
investigation of the murder of five boys between June, 1980 and May
1981. These five murders are part of the series called the Atlanta Child
Murders.

Wayne Williams, now 47, has always maintained his innocence. Chief Graham is of the same mind:

"After
Wayne Williams was arrested, there was this decision by some people to
close the cases, and I have never been one to espouse that kind of
investigation or paint that kind of broad brush," Graham told The
Associated Press. "I have never believed that he did anything."

Chet Dettlinger told CNN he sided with Graham.

"I
do agree with Louie that Wayne Williams didn't kill anybody, he said.
But Graham, he said, believed at the time the Ku Klux Klan may have been
involved, and Dettlinger disagreed."I don't know if Wayne Williams is innocent or not," he said. "I just don't think they proved him guilty of anything."Wayne
Williams was not convicted in the murder of the five young men who are
the current focus of the cold-case squad that Graham has assembled, but
the cases were considered committed by one individual.

Ku Klux Klan Connection

Wayne Williams

By the fall of 2005, the ongoing investigation into
Wayne Williams was slow. The lack of new evidence was blamed for the
slow progress DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham and the newly
formed "cold case" team made while investigating the murder cases
attributed to Williams. According to Harry R. Webber of the Associated
Press (2005), Graham cautioned that "he did not come into the case with
any new evidence" but hoped to soon uncover some new leads and revive
old ones that would likely vindicate Williams. In the interim, the
emphasis of the investigation focused primarily on the alleged
involvement of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members, some of who are now deceased.�

Lubie Geter

The KKK's alleged link to the murders was first noted during the
initial investigation but was discounted later when Williams became the
main suspect in the Atlanta child murders. During the inquiry into the
murders in the 1980s, there were secretly recorded conversations made of
reputed KKK members under police surveillance. Webber reported that in a
1981 recording of one of the conversations, Charles Sanders, the
younger brother of an alleged KKK officer, told a Georgia Bureau of
Investigation informant that "the killer had 'wiped out a thousand
future generations of niggers...,' which would inevitably create an
uprising among blacks that they were killing the children, that they are
going to do one each month until things blow up." In his article,
Webber stated that the informant also "told police that Sanders had
threatened to strangle one of the children, Lubie Geter, because Geter
ran into Sanders' car with a go-cart." Geter was later found strangled
to death but Sanders was never implicated in the murder.A
month and a half into the investigation of the KKK members, the police
dropped the case against the men after they passed a lie detector test.
Soon after, Williams became the main suspect in the murders. Some of the
victims' parents believe that the men may have played a role in several
of the abductions and murders, although there is no substantiating
evidence, aside from the tapes. Williams' defense team was forced to
look elsewhere for new clues.

The Child Molester Theory

On June 20, 2006, the state of Georgia asked a federal judge
to reject Wayne Williams' latest effort to challenge his incarceration
because lawyers for the convicted killer have failed to show any
relevance between the case and an unnamed child molester on whom they
have cast suspicion, according to Associated Press."Williams'
lawyers have had months to subpoena records from the DeKalb County
Police Department regarding the purported suspect and have failed to do
so, Assistant Attorney General Mary Beth Westmoreland said.'"There
is no basis for doing so now,' Westmoreland wrote in an objection to
Williams' request for a judge to reconsider her dismissal of his habeas
corpus petition."

Patrick Baltazar

The unnamed convicted child molester worked in the
vicinity where many of the victims' bodies were found. The documents,
which recently resurfaced, suggested that the man, currently serving
time in a Georgia prison for multiple molestation charges, was a "viable
suspect in the child murders," although the information was never
released to defense attorneys, it was reported.

Aaron Wyche

When the defense team was unable to come up with evidence linking the molester to any of the crimes, theDeKalb police department dropped their investigation into the five murder cases involvingAaron Wyche, 10; Patrick Baltazar, 11; Curtis Walker, 13; Joseph Bell, 15; and William Barrett, 17.David Simpsonreported thatthere just wasn't enough evidence to justify further investigation.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quotedinterim Police Chief Nick Marinellisaying,"We
dredged up what we had, and nothing has panned out." Instead, he
announced that they were going to turn their attention to other cold
cases that were in his reach. For the meantime, Williams will remain in
jail with little chance for appeal. It is likely he will remain
incarcerated for the duration of his sentence.

1 comment:

The most thorough and detailed report I have been able to find online about this case. I really have doubts about Wayne Williams guilt. I have the movie Who Killed Atlantas Children on dvd. It examines all the inconsistencies in the case and the subsequent trial.In contrast a 2010 doco by CNN is very biased and points towards his guilt by omitting many facts of the case.